Thom Yorke Releases Album On BitTorrent

Trending News: What? Thom Yorke Just Released A Brand New Album On BitTorrent

Why Is This Important?

Because this is the future of the music industry.

Long Story Short

Radiohead singer Thom Yorke released a brand new, completely unannounced album this morning via BitTorrent. Yorke is calling this digital release an experiment in music distribution, allowing fans to download the first track free of charge and buy the entire album online for only $6.

Long Story

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke shocked fans and critics alike today by dropping a surprise solo album, titled Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, online this morning. A follow-up to The Eraser, Yorke’s 2010 debut solo effort, Tomorrow’s lead single “A Brain in a Bottle” is currently available online free of charge. Fans can purchase the rest of the album for a mere $6 on BitTorrent. Wait, what?

While we’ve seen a number of huge artists experiment with iTunes exclusive releases over the past year or two (most notably Beyonce’s chart smashing, self-titled release), mega-successful musicians toying with torrents was, until today, uncharted territory. While corporate dinosaurs have often blamed sites like BitTorrent for the decline of the music industry at large, Yorke’s new project proves that collaborating with these “pirates” may be a practical way off pulling in profit from record releases.

Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich issued a statement about their decision to go digital this morning on BitTorrent’s blog page. "If it works well, it could be an effective way of handing some control of Internet commerce back to people who are creating the work, enabling those people who make either music, video or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves [and] bypassing the self-elected gatekeepers.”

Hey Avicii, remix Thom Yorke's new song "The Mother Lode" and you will have a massive smash hit

According to Rolling Stone, the benefits of releasing an album via BitTorrent are vast. Not only can Yorke and his team keep tabs on who’s buying the album and which songs are the album’s best performers, BitTorrent takes a much smaller cut of the album’s profits, allowing artists to price their releases lower while still covering necessary costs — standard online distributors reportedly take 40% of an album’s cover price, while BitTorrent only takes a 10% cut.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: Will non-tech savvy fans have enough patience to figure out this new purchasing system? Can you see BitTorrent playing a major role in the revitalization of the music industry?

Disrupt Your Feed: I just torrented Thom Yorke’s brand new album — and I don’t feel bad about it whatsoever.

Drop This Fact: Yorke is no stranger to experimenting with distribution formats — Radiohead’s 2007 release In Rainbows made headlines for being made available as an online exclusive, pay-what-you-want download months before its physical CD release.